[This is part three of a series on Dating and Relationships:  bypassing Christian rhetoric and examining the best models for interactions between men and women with candor, honesty, and directness.  Tough questions are encouraged, controversy is invited, and the submission of differing opinions is welcomed -- so please feel free to comment as often as you'd like.]

To be honest, I never really had a plan for my life or a philosophy on dating and relationships when I first met Marci.  I was not particularly forward with my intentions, when we first started getting to know each other.  And, if I'm being completely straightforward, I don't think that either of us were really mature enough to handle a relationship.

But then again, I was only ten years old.

The first time that Marci and I met was shortly after my family had moved from Wisconsin to Ohio, when my Dad accepted a job with the church with which Marci's family was also involved.  And unfortunately, I can't say that it was love at first sight.  At that age, actually, I considered girls "yucky" and carriers of the dreaded "cooties" virus that terrorized so many boys my age.  All the same, I don't think I was particularly interesting to Marci (she had actually been hoping for a girl her age, when she heard that my family was moving to town)... So for the first several years, we kept our distance.  Later on, as we got into our high school years, I guess there started to be more of a mutual intrigue -- an awareness of each other on a different level than previously -- and we started to develop a friendship.  We enjoyed laughing at our Sunday school teachers and generally socializing within the church youth group.  Over time, I started to admire her gentle spirit, her intelligent conversation, as well as her golden hair, soft features, and porcelein skin.  A couple of times I even started to wonder if maybe I should ask Marci out; but for whatever reason (probably because I was a spineless, spindly, insecure teenager), nothing really happened... until the summer of 1993.

In that summer, just before my junior year of high school, I migrated to a summer job on the North Dakota (USA) / Sasketchewan (Canada) border.  Out on my own, for the first time in my life, I experienced my first bouts of homesickness.  And I don't know if Marci actually heard about my homesickness or just ventured to guess that such might be the case (since she had spent her previous summer even further away, in Taiwan) -- but somehow, she decided to send me a care package along with a letter containing some of the news from Ohio and such.  Of course, I was elated to receive such mail -- because of its sweet reminder of home and (I was intrigued to discover) especially because it was from her.  I probably read her letter dozens -- if not hundreds -- of times, in the bunk of that North Dakota log lodge which constituted my home for that summer.  I studied her handwriting and punctuation -- trying to guess her tone and her intentions in writing such a letter.  Could it be that maybe she was interested in me, too?  Could it be that she was trying to drop me a hint?  Did she write letters like this to other guys, too?  What did it mean when she signed the letter, "Love, Marci"?  It was fun to theorize.  After a day or two, I decided to reciprocate with sending a letter back from the prairie.  And throughout the rest of that summer, we traded letters back and forth -- maybe a total of three or four times.  Thus, when the end of the summer came and I returned back to Ohio, I was anxious -- oh so anxious -- to see what might come of it all...

But when I got back to Ohio, in spite of the experiences of "growing up" out West that summer and in spite of the growing excitement that I had for Marci, I was quietly dismayed to discover that I immediately and automatically reverted to the same spineless, spindly, insecure teenager who had left Ohio a couple of months previously.  Yes, I was definitely more awake to the possibilities.  I twittered about it a little bit with my brother and some of the other guys from the youth group.  And I started thinking a bit more strategically about what I wanted from a girl -- even going so far as to write out a list (in a secret code language that I had invented, so that no one else would be able to read my notes) enumerating qualities to be looking for:  like, someone who was a Christian (nevermind the fact that my faith was more cultural than personal at that point in my life), someone who was intelligent, fun-loving, beautiful... I wish I could remember all of the things that I had on that list -- though, suffice to say, they were all somewhat bland and definitely sculpted with sufficient space to allow for the inclusion of Marci (who was already clearly in my field of vision)!  To say the least, I thought quite a bit about asking her out on a date... but I was just too afraid to do it.  She was a couple years older than me, I reasoned... She was just getting ready to leave for her first year at Bowling Green State University... She would not be interested in going out with a high schooler like me... I'd be better off to forget the whole thing...

And then came the Bucyrus Bratwurst Festival.

This is the embarrassing part of our story, because I must admit that Marci made the first move... and that the beginning of our romantic relationship will always be linked to a local festival celebrating the virtues of a spicy grilled sausage... But, of course, this is also kind of the charming part of the story.  Sometime around the middle of August, just as I was in the process of trying to lay "the whole Marci thing" to rest in my head -- pre-convinced of its failure -- Marci called me on the phone.  I don't remember much of the conversation, except for the part when she asked, "Umm... Eric, I was wondering if you might want to go to the Bratwurst Festival with me on Friday night..."  And of course, I said yes -- probably not maintaining the least bit of cool -- and when the phone call ended, I felt like my head was in the clouds.  I was euphoric.  I was incredulous.  I was going on a date with Marci Anderson!

That night (August 20th, 1993 -- exactly fourteen years ago!), she picked me up in her parents blue Cutlass Supreme (How lame was I, even letting her do the driving?!?!), and we drove to downtown Bucyrus with hearts full of happiness and mouths full of nervously excited chit-chat.  We found some of her high school friends.  We watched the parade, with the Bratwurst Queen and her Court (no, I am not making this up!).  We rode on some of the carnival rides.  We enjoyed some carnival foods (elephant ears and funnel cakes).  We had good, natural conversation throughout the course of the evening -- entirely platonic, I might as well mention, with not so much as casual physical contact or even mentioning the fact (even to each other) that we were out "on a date" along the way.  And then, after several hours of fun, we got back in the car to drive home.  We had both enjoyed the evening immensely... But then we started talking about the fact that she was leaving for Bowling Green the next morning, while I would be returning to high school for another two years... And, well, we ended the evening with just as many questions as answers.  We weren't far enough in our relationship to talk in any kind of definitive terms about what the future might hold, so we kind of left things with an unspoken "wait and see" attitude.  I gave her a mix tape when she finally dropped me off, to take with her to college (What good early 1990s love story exists without an exchange of mix tapes?!?!)... And then she drove off into the night -- and then off to college the next day.

Sometime that next week, as fate would have it, we both sent letters to each other that crossed in the postal system.  And thus began a ritual of exchanging three to four letters every week -- back and forth between Shelby and Bowling Green.  We wrote about what was happening throughout the course of our days.  We wrote about our likes and dislikes.  We wrote about our personal aspirations for the future.  We wrote about things that made us laugh and things that made us cry.  We wrote about each other.  And we started to write about who we might become as individuals, and as a couple, as things continued into the future.  Every now and then, Marci would come home for the weekend, and we'd go out -- to have a meal together, to watch a movie, to attend a sports event, to hang out with other friends from the youth group.  Sometimes, I'd go up to Bowling Green and visit her there.  And slowly -- very slowly -- our relationship deepened and developed.

In October of that year, we held hands for the first time -- in the movie theater.  That Thanksgiving (late November), while Marci was home from BGSU on a one-week vacation, we had our first kiss -- which was followed in relatively short order with our first make-out session.  The first time we said "I love you" to each other was over the telephone sometime that fall.  Somewhere along the line, we started calling each other "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" -- and we sorted out that our relationship was exclusive.  But I can't remember exactly how all of this took place!  We didn't really have a plan for how our relationship would progress; it just did.  We were smart enough to establish some physical boundaries -- basically just "no sex before marriage" (although, in retrospect, we might have done better to draw even better protective boundary lines).  But we went at things pretty haphazardly, figuring it all out as we went.  We didn't have a lot of other people with whom we were talking about our relationship.  We didn't even do the best job of always talking to each other about our relationship.  Even so, those early years of dating proved to be a very fun and fruitful period of our lives.

After three years of dating, I proposed to Marci -- on the 20th of August, 1996 (exactly 11 years ago) -- after a lovely Italian dinner and a solo piano-accompanied ballad in which I sang, "When I first saw you I was all alone, looking for a love I could call my own.  Watching a dream step out of time, suddenly it came to my mind that maybe you... I'm hoping that maybe we... I'm praying that maybe you and I could spend our lives together."  She said yes, and well -- that's basically what we've been doing ever since...

The whole story, of course, is much longer and more complex than all this.  Still, I hope it serves to establish a bit more of where I'm coming from in my personal experience of dating and relationships... If I were to do it all over again, sure, there are things that I would do differently.  But of course there are also things that I would want no other way.  Looking back, I can see our story with a healthy dose of both pride and embarrassment.  We've definitely learned a lot along the way.  Obviously, it might be useful to sum up some of these object lessons (specifically enumerating what went wrong and what went right)... but I'm going to save that for part four of this series...